MIND newsletter: Acting our age and inner child
Happy Saturday everyone! 😉
1. M (Challenge your mindset)
An interesting person I met during my trip to get back in touch with my own culture is, someone that shouldn’t have been a stranger to me, myself about 8 years ago. The environment usually has such power. In contact with given changes in our environment, we could revert back to an earlier stage of our development – both personally and professionally. Often when that happens, we are not aware of it. We are not aware of what makes us angry or sad in certain situations that seem to be ok with others. We couldn’t explain why in our career we desire one thing and do the opposite. Sometimes in such situations, we are reminded to act our age. But what is it supposed to mean?
And then at times, we find ourselves stuck with our pride of wordliness and intellectual sophistication that adulthood brings, while also wondering, what it means, really, to tap into the concept of the “inner child” that psychology considers to be the key to healing.
Speaking of the inner child and how becoming more aware of it helps make better life/career decisions, I love this quote from The School of Life:
We are dealing with unwanted restless ghosts who have not been appeased or understood - but whose ongoing ignored unhappiness threatens the course of our lives… No version of us entirely disappears, it is merely added to and buttressed, just like an oak tree that still contains, in its rings, the marks of all its former circumferences.
Offering kindness, empathy, and generosity to the five, ten or twenty year olds who still exist in our minds is indeed what is needed to write our next life/career chapters.
2. I (I’m my own coach)
A conversation with the inner child, or in other words – reparenting our inner child – will help identify, understand and show compassion to the child within and the difficult times it went through, with kindness.
Imagine the person you are talking to is the younger you at a time when you find life and the situation difficult.
– How do you (the younger you) feel about what is happening?
– I feel that event/situation affects my life now in the following ways:…
– What could others have done for you to help?
– How can I support myself now in my life?
– Can you accept that you were a child and could not fix the situation? You have nothing to feel bad about.
– Can I accept that sometimes the way I react is a result of my past? Can I recognize it does not have to be this way?
3. N (The power of Now)
What do you think triggers your negative or unhelpful behavior?
4. D (Do)
What is one thing you could do to limit such triggers in your current environment?
References:
Jeremy Sutton (2022). A conversation with the Inner Child, Positive Psychology. https://positive.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/A-Conversation-with-the-Inner-Child.pdf
